Saturday, December 17, 2016

1990 preface to In Defense of Marxism

The following is the preface to the third edition of In Defense of Marxism by Leon 'Trotsky, to be published this month by Pathfinder. The preface is copyright @ 1990 and reprinted by permission of Path-finder.

BY DOUG JENNESS

Unleashing decades of pent-up anger and frustration, millions across Central and East-em Europe took to the streets in the closing months of 1989 and early 1990 demanding justice and political rights. By July 1990, when this preface was written, they had toppled or shaken most of the regimes dom-inated by Stalinist Communist Parties. In doing so, they opened the door for working people to break out of the political cocoon they were wrapped in for more than four decades by the repressive policies of the privileged bureaucratic castes in these coun-tries. The disintegration of the Stalinist par-ties and the formation of weaker and more unstable regimes create the possibility for workers and farmers to take the first steps toward getting involved in political life, or-ganizing to defend their class interests, and being influenced by struggles of working people and national liberation fighters in other countries.

The parasitic petty-bourgeois caste in the Soviet Union, too, is being wracked by this crisis. Workers' strikes are mounting. Mobi-lizations of nationally oppressed peoples threaten secession from the USSR by repub-lics from the Baltics to Azerbaijan.

Moreover, economic stagnation has led to a decline in workers' living standards and to growing popular unrest and protests through-out Central and Eastern Europe and the So-viet Union. In the face of this situation, most of the regimes -both the new governments in most Eastern European countries and the Communist Party-dominated regime in the Soviet Union -have initiated steps to re-structure their economies by employing wider use of capitalist market methods and incentives.

These momentous changes are stimulating interest and discussion among working peo-ple, students, and others around the world. There is a thirst for a clear explanation of the economic, social, and political contradictions in the structures of these countries, where capitalist ownership of basic industry and

banking was overturned decades ago. Questions include: What is the social char-acter of these states? Is capitalism being restored? What, if anything, is there for workers

to defend in these societies? What is the character of workers' struggles? What should be the stance of working people in the United States and other countries to these develop-ments? What is the relationship of workers in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to struggles against capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination around the world? The republication of this book by Leon Trotsky is a helpful guide for working through answers to these and other questions. As a central leader of the October 1917 Russian revolution and of the Communist International in its early years, Trotsky brings insights from direct experience. Although the ' articles and letters in this volume were writ-ten 50 years ago, their evaluation of Soviet society and its contradictory place in world ·politics is not only accurate but essential to understanding the permanent crisis of the Stalinist parties and the growing instability of the regimes in Eastern and Central Europe ; and in the USSR itself.

In the late 1920s Trotsky had been ex-pelled from the Soviet Communist Party and forced into exile by Joseph Stalin. Trotsky's "crime" was to have continued to fight for the communist course that V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had followed before the bureau-cratic degeneration of the revolution under Stalin.

"Stalinism" refers to the counterrevolu-tionary policies of the privileged social caste that emerged and consolidated its power at that time and continues its domination in the Soviet Union to this day. These Stalinist policies were endorsed by the leaderships of parties that called themselves "Communist" around the world. They subordinated workers' struggles to serving the diplomatic needs of the caste in the Soviet Union and, after World War II, of the castes that exer-cised power in other countries where capi-talism had been overturned in the decade following the war.

In 1939--40, when the materials in this book were written, Trotsky was living in exile in Mexico. In August 1940 he was assassinated by an agent of Stalin.

Trotsky wrote these articles and letters as part of a debate inside the Socialist Workers Party during the opening stages of the second interimperialist world war. The key issue in dispute was what kind of party needed to be built in the United States and around the world: a revolutionary party that was truly part ofthe working class and its struggles, or ·a petty-bourgeois radical party calling itself working class in words, while buckling in deeds to bourgeois public opinion? What kind of party could stand up to the pressures of the capitalists' intensifying prowar propa-ganda and anticommunist hysteria?

Trotsky's standpoint was that of the work-ing class, both inside the Soviet Union and internationally. He explained that clarity on the class character and contradictions of the Soviet Union was interlinked with the polit-ical tasks and orientation of revolutionary workers the world over. It was necessary to distinguish between the nationalized prop-erty relations that resulted from the expro-priation of the capitalist class, which were conquests of the workers and peasants during the opening years of the Russian revolution, and the counterrevolutionary policies of the privileged social caste. Only by doing so could working people around the world know what they should do to defend the Soviet Union against impending military at-tack (which came with imperialist Germany's invasion in June 1941, less than a year after the final items in this collection were written).

The underlying cause of World War II was the rivalry among the competing capitalist ruling families of the imperialist countries, Trotsky explained. A manifesto on the war drafted by Trotsky and adopted by the SWP and other revolutionary organizations in May 1940 outlined the tasks of working people as they were dragged into the slaughter by the capitalist rulers. (See Writings of Leon ' Trotsky 1939-40, Pathfinder, 1973, pp.l83-222.)

Trotsky's analysis of the economic and social structures of the Soviet Union and the counterrevolutionary character of the Stalin-ist bureaucracy, which the SWP shared, has been tested by history and confirmed. More-over, the prognosis that the war would lead to a new wave of working-class revolutions and anticolonial uprisings was also borne out, although in ways that Trotsky and the SWP did not and could not have foreseen.

Despite the Stalin regime's continuing

counterrevolutionary course during the war,wthe workers and peasants of the Soviet Union suc-cessfully beat back the German imperialist in-vasion. The military turning point came in iearly 1943 when Soviet resistance broke the siege of Stalingrad. The victories of Soviet work-ing people, won at great human and material cost, not only defended the conquests of the October revolution and pre-vented the restoration of capitalism and imperial-ist domination in the So-viet Union. They also gave a powerful impulse to anticolonial and other national liberation strug-gles throughout Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. And capital-ist property relations were overturned in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Yugoslavia, elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe,North Korea, China, and then North Vietnam. The extension of the socialist revolution, however, occurred under the domination of Stalinist, not revolutionary, leadership. Moreover, the strength of Stalinism in the workers' movement in Western Europe, es-pecially France and Italy, blocked any chance for socialist victories in a major imperialist power. Thus, the revolutionary advances irri-pelled by the triumph of Soviet working people over imperialist aggression did not "inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bu-reaucracy in the USSR and regeneration of Soviet democracy," as Trotsky had antici-pated. These advances did not result in a political revolution that restored power to the Soviet working class under the leadership of a renewed communist party.

Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (Pathfinder, 1972), which is an essential complement to In Defense of Marxism, he based his prognosis of a political revolution in the Soviet Union on the com-munist consciousness that still existed among tens of thousands of workers who had gone through the October Revolution or had been deeply influenced by its revolutionary lead-ership.

In the decades since, however, this polit-ical consciousness has eroded so much under the stultifying conditions imposed by the Stalinist regimes that today there is no com-munist working-class vanguard in the Soviet Union or anywhere in Central or Eastern Europe. Instead, there has been a sharp break in continuity with the rich communist tradi-tions of the early Soviet government under

Lenin's leadership and the first five years of the Communist International.

Workers throughout Eastern and Central Europe, however, are regaining political room to organize and become involved in politics. They are seeking to fight back against attacks on their economic and social conquests as the regimes -new and old - . in all these countries increase reliance on capitalist methods and try to forge closer ties to the imperialist ruling classes of Western Europe, North America, and Japan. It is through struggles like these that working people from Berlin to the Pacific coast of the Soviet Union will link up with fights by other workers and fanners the world over, test alternative strategies and ideas, and begin anew the bUilding of proletarian communist leaderships.

* *

The political crisis in the Socialist Workers Party discussed by Trotsky in these pages · was precipitated by the signing of the "non-aggression" pact between the governments of the Soviet Union and Germany (the Sta-lin-Hitler Pact) on Aug. 22, 1939, and the outbreak of war a week later with the inva-sion of Poland by German imperialism. A substantial minority in the SWP leadership and membership concluded that there was no longer anything progressive in the Soviet Union to defend. This panicky turning away from historic conquests of the international workers' movement reflected a more funda-mental retreat from any perspective of build-ing a revolutionary proletarian party in the United States and worldwide.

For several years, Trotsky had been urging the SWP to adopt an "orientation of the whole party toward factory work" and to deepen its active involvement in the industrial trade

unions. He called for systematic political activity among workers who are Black. "'They are convoked by the historic develop-ment to become a vanguard of the working class," Trotsky said. His views on these ques-tions can be found in Background to "The Struggle for A Proletarian Party" and Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-De-termination, both published by Pathfinder. Many questions of communist leadership and party building that arose in the 1939-40 debate were also addressed in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party (Pathfinder, 1972) by James P. Cannon, SWP national secretary at the time. This book remains a valuable com-panion volume to In Defense of Marxism and should be studied along with it.

For a broader picture of the effort to forge a party of the working-class vanguard in the United States, Pathfinder's foui-volume se-ries on the struggle to organize the Teamsters union in the Midwest is especially useful: Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Team-ster Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy. The series was written by Farrell Dobbs, a prom-inent leader of the Teamster organizing drives in the 1930s who later served as the SWP's national secretary. Dobbs describes the hard-fought labor battles through which an entire layer of working-class fighters learned how to carry out serious revolutionary work in the trade unions and were won to socialism. The impact of the Teamsters' experience on the evolution and development of the forces that founded the SWP was deeply felt in the 1939-40 struggle, in which the proletarian character of the party was challenged and successfully defended.

During the period of capitalist expansion following World War ll, the labor movement was pushed out of the center of politics in the United States. This began to change as the 1974-75 international recession, the

deepest since 1937, registered the scope of the economiC crisis facing the capitalist rul-ers. To bolster declining profit rates, employ-ers began squeezing more out of working people and launched an assault on the unions. Labor's resistance to this assault, which has gone through ups and downs, has moved the unions back into a central place in U.S. and world politics. Moreover, the unions have been deeply affected by the conquests of social and political battles of recent de-cades (the struggle for Black rights, the anti-Vietnam war movement, fights for women's rights, etc.) and by the changing composition of the working class in the United States (growing numbers of immigrant workers, the increasing percentage of women).

In response, the Socialist Workers Party entered a new stage of its evolution by turning its face and activity to work in the industrial trade unions. The 1978 report by Jack Barnes for the SWP National Committee that adopted this perspective explained that this tum was necessary to "carry forward the basic proletarian orientation the party has had for decades." That report and other docu-ments outlining a course to build a proletarian party in the closing decades of the twentieth century are contained in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, published by Pathfinder in 1981.

* *

In Defense of Marxism was first published in 1942 with an introduction by George Novack and Joseph Hansen, two leaders of the SWP. Hansen was one of Trotsky's sec-retaries in Mexico during much of the time the 1939-40 discussion in the SWP was taking place. Novack and Hansen updated their introduction for the second edition of the book in 1973.

The Introduction to the second edition, by George Novack and Joseph Hansen can be read here.